Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA has been announced by judge Alisha Kaplan as the winner of the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine at an awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her winning poem was Letter to Body Made Hollow and she was also shortlisted for On the Evolution of Cancer.
Hippocrates Young Poet Prize winner Taylor Fang
With £500 for the Young Poets Award, the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem by a young poet. The Young Poets award is supported by healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
Poetry Foundation, Chicago
The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poet Award was judged by Toronto poet Alisha Kaplan who shortlisted and commended poems from the USA and the UK.
Also in the running for the £500 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize were Haemaru Chung from New York City, for Alice and Margot Armbruster, from Wisconsin, USA for Husk.
The following poets were commended: Miles Johnston McInerney from San Diego, USA for 20 Reasons Why I Can’t Order in a Restaurant; Vivian Lu from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, USA for Case Study on Grief; Lara Wise from Oundle in England for In Quarantine; Sabina Holzman from Laguna Beach, California, USA for Panic Attack as a House Fire in the City; Shannon Lin from Santa Clara, California, USA for Passing; and Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA for Scale of Bone Density, Azure.
About the Young Poet entries she said: “I am in awe of the clarity, wisdom, and resilience with which these young poets write. Weaving medical language with lyrical, they give raw, honest depictions of both physical and mental illness. These poems are written with the vision one can gain when malady or death enters and pervades one’s world, changing its colors, textures, tempo.”
She added: “There are many candid elegies to bodies transformed visibly or invisibly by illness, addressed to loved ones as well as to the poets’ own selves. At times whispering, at times keening, these voices face their pain and grief, and out of their suffering make something beautiful, something true.”
The winning, shortlisted and commended poems in the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize have been published in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize Anthology which was launched at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on Friday 11th May.
Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805 or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the relationship between medicine and poetry.
More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine
The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.
The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology.
The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:
The Healthy Heart Charity 